The Clippings File: The Jackie McLean Years

This week, in the magazine, I’ve written a Critic’s Notebook about the welcome restoration and reissue of Shirley Clarke’s first feature film, “The Connection,” from 1961, which is one of the finest and harshest movies about jazz that exists. (It opens at IFC Center this Friday.) The movie is based on a play by Jack Gelber, about a group of junkies—including a quartet of musicians—who are waiting in a New York loft for their dealer to arrive with their heroin fixes. Needless to say, plenty of non-musicians (such as the four friends with whom the musicians hang out in the loft) also shot heroin, but there was also a terrible link between the modern-jazz milieu and the drug. Charlie Parker, who figures significantly in the film (one of his records is played onscreen, and there’s a picture of him on the wall), was an addict, and many of the musicians who picked up on his musical advances also picked up the habit. One of the crucial accounts of the subject is found in the late pianist Hampton Hawes’s autobiography, “Raise Up Off Me,” from 1974 (co-written by Don Asher).

Hawes, born in 1928 (he died in 1977) was a great bebop pianist who grew up in Los Angeles and first heard Parker—with astonishment—in 1945: “Those of us who were affected the strongest felt we’d be willing to do anything to warm ourselves by that fire, get some of that grease pumping through our veins. He fucked up all our minds. It was where the ultimate truth was.” But, Hawes adds, “Bird was out and he was strung, and in order to be around him you had to contend with that.” And here’s how Hawes characterizes the situation that turned Parker to drugs:

There should be a monument to him in Washington, D. C.; instead the New York police had refused him a cabaret card, denied him his livelihood. He hated the black-white split and what was happening to his people, couldn’t come up with an answer so he stayed high. Played, fucked, drank, and got high. The way he lived his life he was telling everyone, You don’t dig me, you don’t dig my people, you don’t dig my music, so dig this shit.

Hawes became a junkie, too, and writes in detail of the adventures and misadventures of the scramble for a fix—his arrests, the collapse of his early professional successes into degradation (in the company of other addicted musicians, such as SonnyClark), his years in prison (commuted by President Kennedy), his struggle to rebuild his career. He also says that, when white musicians asked him for “the secret,” he “thought back to the church and the locked piano, all those years strung and tore up, wasting in army dungeons…”

The question of drug use is inseparable from that of users’ legal persecution. (I wrote here recently about the absurd waste of lives and the horrific inequities that result from America’s prosecutorial approach toward drug addicts.) There had been, after all, Prohibition—but Prohibition, for artists, had been a joke. Alcohol use was rampant in the Roaring Twenties, speakeasies and bootleggers were elements of the social whirl, and it was not the use of alcohol but the rise of gangsters that was an element of social critique (except for D. W. Griffith, whose final film, “The Struggle,” from 1931, was as vehement and wrenching an anti-alcohol movie as has ever been made). No one in “The Great Gatsby” worried about being arrested for having a drink.

Drug users face not just the physical hazards of addiction but arrest and imprisonment. One of the bitter ironies of Hawes’s book concerns his voluntary enrollment in rehab—and his equally voluntary departure from it when he had a craving to get high. It turned out that he overcame his habit only due to a ten-year jail sentence (the one that was commuted by executive clemency, after five years, in 1963). Jackie McLean, the saxophonist in the movie and also, of course, one of the greatest of jazz saxophonists in real life spoke about the subject in an interview done in 1996 for Ken Burns’s PBS series “Jazz.” (His 1961 recording “A Fickle Sonance” is on the list of a hundred essential jazz albums that David Remnick, the magazine’s editor, did for this site and on which I lent a hand.)

McLean says, “A lot of guys in my community that idolized and worshipped Charlie Parker began to experiment” with heroin; he says that he was an addict for eighteen years, and that Parker, whom he knew, was dismayed that McLean had started using:

“You know, Jackie,” he said, “man, you should try to be like Horace Silver and some of the younger musicians that’s coming along today and, and, and, and get yourself together,” he said, “You know, man, you really ought to… I feel responsible for, for what you’re doing,” he said, “and you, you, you need to come on and kick me in the behind for this, you know?”

As for “The Connection,” McLean said,

No, it was like that. It was like that was a real hunk of life, that play. It was way ahead of its time. I mean, it’s… America now is experiencing for the past 30 years this, what this play predicted. ‘Cause see, when we went to London with that play, they couldn’t relate to it because they, they had legalized drugs over there, so they didn’t have anybody waiting in a house for a connection to come. You went to the doctor and got a prescription and went to the drugstore and procured your drugs, you know, you didn’t… And they didn’t have any drug convictions in London. I think when I was in London in 1961, they had 3 drug convictions in the whole country. So, legalized drugs can be an answer for a problem like that. Of course, when you say that in America, people get all excited and think that you going to stand on the streets selling drugs like hot dog stands, or something and it wouldn’t be like that.

In a 1998 interview with Mike Zwerin, McLean, who died in 2006, said of the play—in which he performed onstage for four years—“I fell in love with theater then and there. Even my saxophone playing became a lot more theatrical after that.” I think he’s right (I wrote here in 2008 and 2009 about a pair of recordings of the score from the play and the movie). He also talked about his life while an addict:

When I was strung out on dope my horn was in the pawn shop most of the time and I was a most confused and troublesome young man. I was constantly on the street, in jail, or in a hospital kicking a habit…. The New York police had snatched my cabaret card and I couldn’t work the clubs any more except with [Charles] Mingus who used to hire me under an assumed name.

In the PBS interview, McLean describes the experience of addiction:

Well, the addiction itself becomes a part of your everyday life so it isn’t a separate life. It is your life. You get up, your body craves the, the drug, it’s, you’re sick. So, you have to go out and get the money and then go and procure the, buy the drugs. And to relieve your body ache, to relieve the pain of, of the sickness that you have when you are addicted to a drug like heroin.

In effect, drug use became itself a sort of drama, a master plot imposed on life, one to which all other activities were subordinated. Hawes, in his book, talks about some of the crazily reckless things he did to procure drugs and to avoid arrest while buying or using. Neither chord structures nor tough audiences seem to have figured much compared to the cruel craving. It’s as if the artist took the whole ugliness—racial discrimination, public indifference, struggles for money, the century’s horrors, and their own personal devils—and distilled them into one Sisyphean agony.

Here’s an early live performance by Hawes, from 1952, with the short-lived tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray, whom Hawes recalls fondly in his book. I had the privilege of seeing McLean perform, in 1975 or ’76, with his sextet (one that included his son, René McLean, on tenor saxophone), at the Five Spot on St. Mark’s Place. Above is a tribute to Parker by McLean, recorded in 1992, a few blocks further to the east.